A hallucinatory, hilarious L.A. escapade.
For a certain type of young person – a type among which I used to count myself – there comes a point, usually in your late 20s, when you figure out that all the boozing, smoking, ingesting, and general revelry in your life is probably keeping you from becoming an actual adult. Me personally, I don’t really remember seeing daylight between 2002 and 2007, but that’s another story.
Point is, youthful excess in most cases tends to give way to mature responsibility, but not without one last hurrah, a binge to end all binges, literally, that good-bye party to the old you that serves as both a send-off to debauchery and a firm reminder of why it has to go.
This is the basic set-up of Garbage, a smarty, funny, hallucinogenic romp through modern-day L.A. as seen through the altered perspectives of Jean and Jacob, a pair of hard-partying young folk who finally decide to go straight, but not before getting very, very crooked one last time. The film is directed by Tayler Vee Robinson, who plays Jean, and was written by Robinson and Arne Gjelten, who plays Jacob. I love love love when a film is written by its lead actor, especially a pair of them, because there’s always an enhanced verisimilitude to the characters, they are always played a touch more thoughtfully because the actor has lived with the character in a different way. Robinson and Gjelten are pitch-perfect examples of this. Not only do their individual characters feel fully-fleshed out, their chemistry together is dynamic and endearing, and helps elevate what could have been another youth-drug-culture flick to the level of a thoughtful, emotion-driven, and yes, incredibly hilarious night-in-the-life study.
Garbage made its online premiere over at No Budge.